The Cloud of Unknowing by Mimi Lipson Page B

which meant drinking with people who drink at 2:30 in the afternoon, which in turn put me in specialized company. The combined effect was, for a while, pleasantly dissociative.
    I never got used to waking up early. Each workday began in a slowly dissipating dream-state: the dark, sleepy passage through empty streets; the arrival at the locked glass door fromwhich spilled the only light on the block; the silent cigarette-and-coffee interlude leaning side-by-side against the counter with Lloyd, the breakfast cook, who was tall and handsome and jet-black, and who, in his white, mushroom-shaped toque, made me think somewhat guiltily of the man on the Cream of Wheat box. Then the rheumy-eyed manager would open up and let in the first customers—usually delivery truck drivers—before passing out on a lawn chair in the stockroom.
    With that, the engine of the day turned over, setting in motion the thousand trivial urgencies of waitressing. The delivery drivers ate their eggs and paid their checks, passing on their way out the Boston Edison workers who arrived in groups of three and four, identical in their winter Carhartts, then table-hopped, creating an atmosphere of screwball anarchy. And as I struggled to keep track of their orders, and as they helpfully passed the plates to one another, the sun would rise unnoticed. Then the civilians started coming in and ordering pancakes, and by the time I had a chance to look out the window, the breakfast rush was winding down and my shift was half over. Another cigarette break, and then construction workers from nearby building sites began showing up for their blue-plate specials. Lunch rush, an hour of stragglers, some sidework—refilling ketchup bottles, wrapping silverware in paper napkins—and my workday was done. In the middle of the afternoon, a time of day when I would normally have been drinking Dunkin’ Donuts coffee hunched over the Help Wanteds, I would get on my bike and ride home. Or, having put in a full day’s work, I might head over to Lou’s, a cavernous taproom around the corner where the clientele largely overlapped with ours.
    Our customers had nothing to do with Boston City Hospital, although we were practically in its shadow. Even with the pass-through traffic—cabbies and hard hats, artists drifting over from the warehouse district to the east—our greasy spoon,which had only been there for a moment and would be gone a moment later, was a local joint. It surprised me to find that the late-night bar scenes I’d worked as a cocktail waitress, for all their sleazy drama, couldn’t touch this place when it came to street theater. Midway through my first shift, an old man slipped on some ice cubes, and I rushed across the room to help him up. He was shaking like a wet sparrow as I steered him to a chair, but before I could sit him down, the manager grabbed his other arm and gave him the bum’s rush out the door.
    â€œGuy takes a dive in here every other week,” he said offhandedly. “He’s got a park-bench lawyer on retainer.”
    I learned about the change-for-a-twenty short con a few days later. I was filling in for the cashier, ringing someone up at the takeout counter, when a man came in off the street.
    â€œHow you doing this morning, Sunshine?”
    In fact, he’d caught me in a good mood: a few days under my belt, getting my sea legs, enjoying the brisk, purposeful clack and chime of the cash register. He bought a can of Pepsi, paying with a twenty.
    â€œSay,” he said as I counted his change out on the counter, “can I trade in some of these extra ones while you’ve got the till open? I’ve got, let’s see, fifteen ones and a five . . .”
    Lloyd leaned over and slammed the register drawer shut with his spatula.
    He was right to keep an eye on me, because I was idiotically smitten by the flimflammers. But the regulars were at least as interesting. There was, for instance,